


White (trash) Christmas

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - College/University, Christmas, Comedy of Errors, F/M, Family Drama, assholes in love, military college au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 17:20:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2781452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's this time of year that your family starts to dip out of regular old awful and into a truly freakish realm of unbearably weird.</p>
<p>or: how does Church/Tex even work in a universe without science fiction tropes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	White (trash) Christmas

**Author's Note:**

> I do not condone having affairs or cheating on your significant other(s). We must never forget what these guys are. They are dicks. That being said, everything works out fine.

Church’s cell went off about two thirds of the way into the campaign, blasting the barking dog ringtone that Caboose had programmed in at top ear smashing volume. He nearly fell out of the chair. Fuck Caboose, seriously, fuck him. He had been perfectly fine with the factory set preprogrammed ring tone, what the fuck was this vet’s office from hell bullshit. He snatched out and tipped the thing up to make out the name on the screen. God he needed new contacts.

“Hold on,” Church said, “my sister’s calling.”

Tex promptly shot his character six times in the back.

He threw down the controller and shouted into the headset, “what the _fuck_ was that Tex?”

“Hoo-rah,” Tex replied. Her character did a little jig.

“You absolute _bitch_.”

He flicked off the headset and answered the call, slouching into the cushions of the chair he’d liberated from a dumpster. And by _he_ , he meant Caboose.

“Carolina,” he said, slipping the phone into the crook of his shoulder while he toggled through the game’s menu screen for a better character option.

“Hey Leonard.”

Church pursed his lips. There was an uncomfortable moment of faint breath and silence.

“Look,” Carolina said, at last, “there’s something I need to tell you. I’ve been talking to Doctor Church—”

“And how’s our old man doing?” Church asked, sneering into the receiver.

“Leonard,” she started.

Church mashed a button too hard and had to restart the whole process. This was the third time since he’d moved out. You’d think a woman could take a hint, particularly since he hadn’t wasted any time _hinting_. He wasn’t going to talk to his shitty father, alright?

“Is he mad we didn’t send him a father’s day card? Did we hurt his feelings?”

“Leonard, please.”

“Don’t _Leonard please_ me, this isn’t my problem.”                     

“I’ve got to tell you this, I am _trying_ to do right by this family.”

“You know, I _really_ don’t want to hear it.”

There was a sharp static sound on the other end of the line. “Fine,” Carolina said. “Never mind.”

Church just grunted vaguely into the receiver. Nevermind was goddamn right.

“You’re living off his paycheck,” Carolina remarked, coldly. “The least you could do is take a little responsibility.”

“The least he could have done was stop at one bullshit kid,” Church snapped back, “but you know what? Here I am.”

There was silence for a long moment, and then Carolina said. “I’ll tell him you said hello,” and hung up on him.

He jerked the phone out from under his ear and stared at the dead screen. Fucking typical. “Thanks a ton, sis,” he remarked to the unlit plastic.

He flicked his headset back on and settled for a different sniper model with the thumb of a button, in the doomed hopes that his aim would be a little better this time.

“Right,” he said. “I’m back. You miss me, asshole?”

\--

“I don’t know,” the girlfriend of the month said, adjusting the window over her breasts with more focus than strictly necessary. “It just seems weird, going to dinner with my boyfriend’s friend who is also a girl.”

It was Friday night— _the_ Friday night—and Church was idling outside the restaurant where he and his date were due for dinner now. Like, _right_ now. Like, he was going to lose his reservation pretty soon. Danica was pretty but she didn’t move very fast, and more than once he’d considered that trying to get her to go anywhere was like trying to lead a cat on a leash. He was beginning to regret a lot of things.

Church banged the back of his head against the headrest out of sheer exasperation. “I’m telling you it’s not weird,” he said. “Besides, she texted me earlier. She’s bringing a date too.”

“Oh!” Danica seemed to light up at that, all interest in the adjustment of her cleavage forgotten. “Well then let’s go, the reservation was five minutes ago.”

Church sighed—loudly and deeply—and threw open the door of his SUV. They were at a four star steak place that he couldn’t pronounce the name of, and as he stepped out into the humid dimness of the street the big neon sign nearly blinded him. He’d parked directly in front of the doorway in what was probably not a legal parking spot, but he was ninety-nine percent confident that a tow truck couldn’t fit in a street this small. Turn radius was too big. Try to beat that, suckers.

He took his girlfriend’s arm and stepped confidently onto the carpet at the entrance. Or he tried to. There was this wrinkle in the carpet and it was dark and, look, sometimes people trip, okay? Everyone does it. Right.

The guy at the podium—what was that, a concierge? Church was never totally clear on the French stuff, might have been garcon. Anyway, the garcon was right on point and knew exactly where the rest of their party had settled in. They passed a few wreaths and some plush red curtains on their way deeper into the restaurant, and Church swallowed thickly.  Places with curtains cost, like, 400% more than places without.

In the delicate lighting of the room beyond, there was one half-occupied table. Church squinted at it, and his mouth went abruptly dry. Tex was wearing the minidress with the shoulder-studs. Oh boy. She glanced up at him as he came through the door and narrowed her eyes, tapped the table with blunt black nails. God have mercy she had amazing biceps; Church was _not_ adequately prepared for this.

“Uh,” he said, “evening guys?”

Tex’s date looked up from her menu. She was attractive in a weather-beaten sort of butch way, a little maternal at the creases. Church mentally backpedaled.

“Laaa…dies?” he corrected, uncertainly.

“Church,” Tex said, in such a way that her lips never actually stopped being a straight line.

Tex’s date was apparently not as dumb as Church’s and immediately picked up on the tension. She stood up, leaned over the table to shake Church’s hand, and when she did he got a surprisingly good view down her pearl-buttoned blouse.

“You must be Leonard,” she said, smiling what looked like an actually smile. “I’m Vanessa, it’s nice to meet you.”

“Call me Church,” he replied, “since, y’know, everyone else does.”

His date made a little impatient noise.

“Oh, right, yeah,” he added, “this is my girlfriend Danica.”

Tex stood up suddenly, pushing back her chair with a low grumble of resistance. “Girls, would you excuse me, I need to use the ladies’ room.” She gave Church a look that could have cowed a rampaging bull. “Be right _back_.”

Church cleared his throat. “Er, me too, actually, one minute ladies. You should, um, introduce yourselves. To each other.”

He jogged to catch up with Tex as she stalked off towards the recesses of the restrooms. He’d only come within a step of her when her hand shot backwards, grabbed him by the arm, and dragged him the rest of the way to the ladies room and then straight through the door. She moved fast. Under the clean white lights of the bathroom she grabbed him by the expensive blue tie and slammed him bodily into a wall. His trajectory missed the hand-dryer by half a foot and his eyes watered just looking at how close that had been.

“You were supposed to be the gay one!” she snapped, fuming.

“Well what about you! You were supposed to go hetero this time!”

Tex wrinkled her nose. “The ex-girlfriend from last time caught me at the club and I had to keep cover.”

“Cover!” Church echoed.

“Yeah, Church, _cover_.” Tex sniffed. “Lesbians are so nervous about bisexual girls. They see you talking to a boy for five minutes and they’re sure you’re going to cheat on them.”

“But you _are_ cheating on her.”

“Well… yeah,” Tex said, “but it’s not because I’m bisexual!”

Church held up his hands. “Sorry, _whatever_ , my bad on not picking up a guy.” He ran a hand through his hair, which mostly just caused his knuckles to crack against the plaster. “Honestly the male dating pool around here is running pretty low since I’m friends with, like, half these assholes already. How the fuck so many queer kids ended up in ROTC I have no idea.”

Neither of them commented on the fact that Church’s entire circle of friends consisted of kids he’d loathed since freshman year. Tex was worse off, if anything. Her circle was made of kids Church had hated since freshmen year and kids who had hated her since they started university.

They stood there in silence for a moment, still suspended in the same positions, until the door swung open. A gawky redheaded chick shuffled in, took one look at the tableau, and froze in mid-step.

“Beat it, gingersnap,” Tex snarled, unmoved.

The girl put it in reverse and backed right the hell out of there.

 Tex remained still for a few seconds longer, and then dropped her hold on Church, who sagged slightly when his feet were flat on the ground again. She adjusted his tie, carefully, and then patted some loose dust off his shoulders.

“She’s hot,” Tex admitted, probably the closest he was going to get to an apology.

“Yeah,” he sighed, “but she’s annoying as hell. Honestly she’s more your type than mine.”

“Hmmm.”

“Bait and switch?” he offered, a shade too hopefully. That Vanessa chick looked like she could pack a punch. He could get into that.

 “Kimball’s a stone-cold lesbian,” Tex replied. “You’re not even on her radar. Truth be told…” she started.

“What?” Church said, after the silence had lasted a few too many seconds.

Tex shrugged, deliberately looking off at the mirror. “I don’t know,” she said, scowling at her own reflection. “Turns out Kimball’s been through some shit. Kinda starting to feel like a dick about this one.”

Church dug his thumbs into his own temples. “Casual, Alison, we’re supposed to keep it _casual_ , this is your rule, man.”

“I _am_ casual _,”_ she huffed. “I just, I’m thinking I might’ve picked a bad mark.”

Church slammed his head back into the wall. “What a clusterfuck. Next time we’re _both_ picking up men.”

“Agreed.”

Church sighed. “I think Danica’s got a major rainbow streak,” he offered. “Maybe if we’re lucky, your girl is less of a purist than the last one.”

Tex considered him for a moment, all rolling biceps and stance like a linebacker, until finally she seemed to reach a satisfactory conclusion. She cracked her knuckles. “Alright,” she said, “let’s go see if we can reverse engineer a seduction.”

\--

It was two in the morning, and Danica was about as smashed as Church, but doing a remarkably better job of keeping her balance, despite the daunting heels on her fashionable shoes. This filled Church with seething resentment. The flashing lights at the bar also filled Church with seething resentment. Everything filled Church with seething resentment.

Danica slung an arm over his shoulder, her hair frizzing across his forehead. “I’m gonna daaaance,” she told him seriously. “Come dance with me.”

“Uh, no.”

She pulled a face that he was too close to make out properly. It looked gargoylesque. “You’re no fun, Leo.”

“Leonard,” he muttered into his gin, twisting his lips into a mirror of hers.

Kimball appeared—holy fuck, when did she get here, where had she come from—just in front of Church, as if from the void itself. He snapped his head back and blinked at her suspiciously while she visibly bit down on a laugh.

“Hey,” she said, turning her attention to Danica, “I’ll go in with you. My date’s being a bit of a Grinch too. The seasick crocodile goes on for miles.”

“No waaaay,” Danica said. “I love that movie.”

Kimball lit up, looking ten years younger and a few drinks drunker than she had just a moment before. “What if,” she said, glancing around the room like a woman with a secret, “what if there’s a dance mix?”

Danica swung up from Church’s side with helium-inflated enthusiasm, grabbing with moderate success for Kimball’s shoulder, gushing the whole way. Kimball smiled. Danica smiled. They stumbled off together towards the dance floor, an odd and loud pair. As the crowd closed behind them, muffling the unrelenting sounds of _Jingle Bell Rock_ once again, Church sighed hugely into his drink.

At the other end of the bar Tex slumped into her seat. “Finally,” she mouthed at the ceiling.

Church raised his glass in salute and then knocked back the rest. That took way longer than he expected. Kimball was a straight shooter if there ever was one, no pun fucking intended.

“Two rum and cokes,” Tex said to the bartender, glaring blearily out her one open eye.

Church levered himself out of his chair and shifted down the length of the bar to sit next to Tex, fairly certain that if the girls hadn’t come back by now then they were going to be out there for the long haul.

“Shitty little town,” he muttered, eyeing the inside of the wood-paneled bar with inflammatory contempt. He eyed the drinks too, when the bartender set them down, watching the fizz and pop of the surface. “One of those for me?”

Tex snorted. “If I was just buying for me do you really think I’d get a couple of bitch drinks?”

 “Bitch drinks?” he echoed, indignant.

“For my bitch,” Tex said scathingly. She paused, drink half way to her mouth, and glared at the far side of the room. “God damn it. This town. Can’t get a measly drink without running into some jerk from class.”

Church glanced at the woman across the room, maybe latina although who could tell in this lighting. She looked nice enough, in a half-shaved-moderate-punk sort of way. Probably could kill him with one hand.

“She heterosexual?” he asked, turning back to Tex.

She bit an icecube clean in two. “Off limits. I don’t date your friends, you don’t date mine.”

“You dated Kaikaina,” Church reminded her, waspishly.

“That’s not your friend, that’s your friend’s sister. Come on, let’s blow. I hate the music they play in this rats nest anyhow.”

Church shrugged. “You got Kimball’s drinks?”

He didn’t ask who was taking Danica home. If Kimball wasn’t up to the challenge, she could call herself a taxi. He shrugged on his jacket, downing the last of his drink as he went.

“Tab’s on you,” Tex said, flashing his wallet like a magician. There were bills on the counter.

He slapped his hands down on his pockets and found that, unsurprisingly, they were empty. “For fuck’s sake,” he groaned.

“Don’t forget to tip,” she said, tossing the depleted thing to him with a neat flick of the wrist.

He caught in, fumbling, and squinted after her retreating form. “Like hell,” he muttered.

He did not leave a tip.

\--

Tex’s phone rang. Her jerking hips stilled, and Church could feel her lift her head, scanning the room for the flare of electronic activity. Her hand was still jamming his head into the pillows as hard as it had been a second before, but the lapse in concentration meant he could twist his neck and turn under her grip.

“You are not fucking answering that,” he gasped, taking deep breaths of sweet oxygen while his face was still free.

Tex didn’t say anything, but her hand between his legs had gone completely still.

“For god’s sake Alison,” he said, “I am like _this close_ , you cannot just take a call when you’re balls deep in me.”

She gave him an irritated little thrust. “This rig doesn’t have balls,” she pointed out.

“This is not the _time_ to _debate_ that.”

But he might as well have saved his breath. Tex grabbed him by the hips and pulled out, each centimeter of slick length like a cruel taunt while he swore open mouthed into the pillows. She left him with a stinging slap to the ass, springs creaking under her knees as she climbed off the bed to go rooting around on the floor.

“I’m gonna jerk it onto your walls,” Church grumbled, digging fingers into the mattress.

“One spot on my stuff and I’ll crush your balls like a nutcracker,” she replied, as casually as you please. There was a shuffle, and then the distant sound of a line ringing through. “Hey Mom,” she said, “what’s up?”

Church could hear her feet on the floor, padding back across the room to where he was still sprawled with his knees spread on the sheets.

“You are _not_ ,” he hissed, lifting his head.

Tex grabbed him by the hair and pushed him back down into the pillow. “No,” she said into the phone, “nothing much. No. _No_. Look we’ve talked about this, I’m not coming back, if that’s all you called for—”

While the faint voice on the other end buzzed through the speakers, Tex lined herself up and slammed into Church with enough force to nearly break him in half. He let out a muffled howl with the little bit of breath that had made it into his lungs, scrabbling at the mattress with desperate hands. His dick throbbed dangerously under him.

“How come you never told me?” Tex was demanding, he’d lost track of the conversation for a second there but she definitely sounded pissed off. She’d let go of his hair and moved to steady herself by grabbing one of his thighs, and he bit into the pillow in a panic. He let out a strangled moan when her knuckles brushed over his balls.

“Yeah I’ve got the tv on,” Tex snapped, “don’t change the subject. Don’t you think this is kind of _important?”_

On that last word she snapped forward, breaking into a furious pace of thrusts that made Church’s whole body twitch helplessly under her.

“No, of course I want to—well that’s your problem, isn’t it? I’m not gonna ignore her just because my mom is scared of her baby daddy, what kind of Jerry Springer—no, you watch _your_ tone!”

 She paused just long enough to swear violently into the receiver and throw the whole thing onto the pile of clothes below the bed before absolutely bulldozing Church into the wall.

He lasted about five seconds.

While he was gasping and trying to get enough control over his arms again to take off the condom, Tex made a noise like she’d been punched and abruptly fell back off him, slipping out with a jerk that made his body spasm. They lay in near silence for a while after that, too worn out to do much more than take in air in huge gulps.

Church did manage to roll over, after a couple tries, and alternated between staring at the ceiling and staring at the slick of sweat down Tex’s back.

“You’re lucky you’re a test tube baby,” she said, after a while. “Mothers are hell.”

“I can’t _believe_ you did that.”

Tex shrugged as well as a person can shrug on a horizontal surface.

“What was that about, anyways?”

“Family shit,” she said. “Apparently I’ve got a half sister somewhere nobody saw fit to tell me about. She’s been trying to get in contact with Mom.”

“Oh.”

Church considered this. Tex had her whole _angry solo marine_ thing going on, sure, but everybody needed a family of one kind or another. Clearly the little she had so far wasn’t cutting it. His own sister—well, half-sister, sure—had been one of the few rocks in his generally less than stellar life thus far. Hell, maybe Tex could manage to build something like that for herself.

“Maybe you should meet her,” he said, finally. “I mean, what’s the worst that could happen.”

\--

This bar, this time, was a subdued pub sort of affair. Tex had picked it the night before, while she texted her mysterious relative from the floor of blue dorm. It had a club attached to it, but the bar had very little spillover from the club on the other side of the door, which was apparently having a gay night that consisted of a lot of boys in tutus, one of which Church definitely knew. He’d been trying not to make eye contact. He liked Donut, if he was going to be totally honest, it was just… jeeze. Not while the guy was sticking his tongue down strangers’ throats at a night club. Too much info.

In the seat next to him, Tex was explaining a complicated jenga stack of family history that Church would never have been able to pry out of her a month ago. She was trying to figure something out, he could feel it. His presence, he suspected, was incidental.

He picked up his glass and did his best to hind behind it. Might have better luck hiding behind his phone, but Carolina had left him two voicemails today and he was superstitiously wary of paying the gadget any more attention than necessary. If he was holding the phone when she tried again, he’d probably cave out of habit.

“No,” Tex was saying, “I’m pretty sure it was CIA. She was _in_ the marines, but they pulled her for some clusterfuck she _still_ won’t talk about. Shit, it was twenty years ago, it’s probably declassified by now.”

Church had never met Tex’s mother. Not even in high school, during the one year they’d both been in ROTC together. She was like a kind of ghost, leaving bizarre gritty landscapes in gilded frames around the house and then disappearing just in time for company. Church remembered looking around that dusty house, dusty but uncluttered, with stacks of cold cuts piled up in the fridge, and remembered feeling the first sting of real affection for the cruel and unyielding girl he’d thrown in his lot with.

“So you’ve got a fake identity,” Church said, uncertain and a little tipsy and getting a headache from the outdated prescription on these glasses.

Tex snorted. “ _She’s_ got a fake identity. I was born after they switched her around. I’ve only ever been Alison,” she corrected him, and then narrowed her eyes at the beer taps. “At least,” she amended, “that I know of.”

“Did you just call yourself Alison?”

Tex locked up, tight as a ship’s rigging. “So?” she retorted.

Church put his hands up. “You kind of hate that name,” he said, “didn’t expect you to use it, pardon-fucking-moi.”

Tex raised her eyebrows as if she was about to really lay into him, but the words dried up on her tongue before she could start. Her dark eyes fixed on a point just past Church’s head, going battle-field tense. Her fists clenched.

“What?” Church asked.

Tex tipped her chin at whatever she had been fixated on, which was enough of a green light for church to swivel in his chair and peer uncertainly through the gloom. It couldn’t be the guys in the chairs down the way because they had been here since midnight. He settled on the two figures by the side entrance, male and female, conversing in sharp whispers. Although with his shitty expired prescription, he was only marginally sure of the genders.

“The chick or the dude?”

Tex winced, despite her best attempt not to show it. “York’s alright,” she said. “It’s the other one who’s the problem.”

She said _problem_ with such a tone of dread that not even her usual bravado could save it.

“Oh shit, is it your nemesis from Naval Science?” Church said, swinging around. “You wanna make a break for it?”

Tex said nothing, but squared her shoulders and drew herself up in her chair. Church hurriedly scanned the room for a good place to throw himself if this broke into a brawl, which seemed like a distinct possibility. Occupational hazard.

He squinted at the _problem._ Even as he was watching, her eye flitted back to Tex behind him. Her whole expression turned into carbon steel blankness. She was a tall woman with dark hair, maybe red, arms crossed tightly over her shirt. She had sort of draped neck tank top kind of look going on, and Church immediately figured her for someone who has no idea how they even got to the club let alone what to do once they got there. And Church immediately recognized her.

“Tex,” he started, “is your arch rival my _sister_?”

Tex did not move a single muscle.

Carolina moved across the floor with an economical grace that telegraphed six years of ballet on top of another six years of combat training. She smiled at Church, an honest to god genuine smile, like he’d done something wonderful and surprising instead of just gone out to a shitty bar with the equally shitty love of his life.

“You got my messages,” she said, as she elbowed past the last milling patron between them. A step or two away, though, her glance finally returned to Tex, and her relieved smile collapsed into frosty irritation. “Leonard,” she said, “is this jumped up bulldozer bothering you?”

Church grabbed both his temples and squeezed like he was trying to pop his head open. “ _No_ ,” he sighed, “this is my girlfriend, Tex. What messages?”

“You’re dating _Tex_?” Carolina said, as if she’d gotten a bit of fishbone stuck in her mouth and she was trying to spit it out.

“Carolina I’ve been dating Tex since like junior year,” he said.

“We’re not _dating_ ,” Tex snapped, automatically.

“Not dating,” Church corrected himself. “Since like junior year. Off and on. You know this, remember how dad nearly flipped over a table the one time I tried to tell him about it?”

Carolina narrowed her eyes at him. “That was when you were dating the girl named Alison.”

Church gestured toward Tex like an exasperated Vanna White. Look what’s behind curtain number one!

“Look,” Tex ground out, “I just brought Church along for company. If it’ll get you out of my face, you can take him.”

The pronouncement didn’t have the desired effect. Carolina seemed to have tuned her out, probably tuned everyone out, and she was staring with an unblinking kind of ferocity that Church remembered from disastrous games of Monopoly on the floor of the childhood apartment. He’d been six. She’d been eleven. He’d cheated and she’d still won.

“What are you drinking?” Carolina asked.

Tex looked down at her cup, expression going as blank as a sheet. “Jack Daniels,” she answered.

Church went back to searching for an escape route. This sort of silence felt more dangerous than an armed charge. The two women just stared at each other, neither shifting. There seemed to be something heavy in their wordless communication.

Finally, Carolina said, “You look just like her.”

Tex tipped up her drink and then nodded, once. “You have her chin,” she admitted, grudgingly. “Nose too.”

Okay well, not a brawl then, but possibly something much more uncomfortable. Church held up a hand, swiveled to look at Tex. “Look, I thought we were here to meet some relative you’d been emailing, not my nosey sister.”

Tex made a mocking Vanna White gesture towards Carolina, who remained unmoving. Look what’s behind curtain number fucking two, folks.

“I’ve been trying to tell you for weeks,” Carolina said. “I tracked down our father’s ex-wife. My mother.”

Church stared into his glass. The family tree was coming together like a beginner’s jigsaw puzzle, albeit one that most preschools would not touch in a million years.

“We are so _white trash_ ,” he said, and promptly downed everything in his glass.

\--

Christmas eve comes like a bad hangover.

A week after the fiasco at the bar, he found Tex hanging around the bottom of the dorm’s fire escape. It was nearly midnight, and the blinking Christmas lights that Caboose had hung right down the side of the building like a fishing line lit her in flashing shades of yellow and white. She was smoking. She had that bomber jacket on, the one that had been her mother’s. She looked like war in cowboy boots, and she was just as terrifyingly attractive as she’d ever been.

“What kind of Edward Cullen bullshit is this?” Church asked, as he tossed the overfull bag of garbage into the dumpster beside her.

“Hey Church,” she said, absently. She let out a puff of smoke.

“I thought you quit,” he said.

She looked down at the cigarette as if she’d never seen the thing before in her life. “I did,” she replied, and unceremoniously dropped the thing onto the asphalt. It smoked uneasily in a crack of pavement just in front of her boot.

He rocked back on his heels a couple times before finally giving up and settling in next to her, his back against the freezing side of the dumpster. “Pretty fucked up,” he offered, warily.

“Pretty fucked up,” she agreed.

Church scowled into the darkness. “So I guess this is the part where we agree not to see each other again and spend the rest of our lives becoming our parents in bitter isolation pining over the lost future that seemed so possible while drowning our sorrows in cheap vodka and Call of Duty 4.”

“Yeaaaah,” Tex said. “Or we could just. Not.”

The Christmas lights buzzed faintly.

“Not,” Church echoed skeptically.

“Not,” Tex agreed. She stuck out her chin. “You’ve got a great ass and nobody else will cry when they try to drink whiskey with me.”

“I don’t _cry_ ,” Church snapped.

“Weeping. Tears down your face. Like a little bitch.” Tex considered this wisely for a moment, and then added, “Plus, how am I gonna come round to nail Grif in the balls if you’re slinking around the hallways all the time being angsty.”

Church tapped the side of the dumpster. “He does need a regular ball-busting.”

Tex nodded. “Fuck this polite society stuff. We aren’t polite, we aren’t society, we’re gonna kill things in a desert and go MIA halfway through our second tour. Your dad won’t care. God knows who my dad is, and my mom’s probably known for years, the enigmatic bitch.”

Church looked at her. Somewhere down the street, a drunk student was attempting to carol something about figgy pudding. He’d stuck with her through years of cheating and stealing and plain old meanness, and in all honesty, if you got right down to it, he would have followed her off a bridge and thanked her for the opportunity on the way down. It was Tex. She was just the kind of awful worth loving.

“Shit,” he said, “let’s be white trash.”


End file.
